Behold Things Beautiful Page 7

  “We were hooded most of the time.”

  “And the other prisoners? Any piece of information — ”

  “They’re dead!” Alma paused. A look of incredulity came over her face. “Is this why you invited me to lecture on Agustini? Just to get me back?”

  Bits of broken wicker dug into his palms as he gripped the chair, waiting for her to get it out, the anger.

  “If this investigator’s so special, he’ll find other witnesses.” Alma stood up.

  “Lalo’s putting together an intricate testimonial. Any detail could be important.”

  “I’ve put it behind me and I’m not going back.” There was a vehemence to her that he’d never witnessed. Perhaps she had inherited her mother’s spirit. Alma would need it if she ever agreed to help.

  “The other day Hannelore revealed how she got me out of prison. It was Patrón Pindalo. He intervened, spoke to someone, possibly paid them off. I was upset at first, but really, what’s the difference? I got out.”

  Flaco couldn’t describe the scenarios of her release that had come to mind over the years, hearing the others’ stories. Of Alma being raped and discarded as worthless. Or some officer falling for her, wanting to protect her. A guard who’d known her and decided to help. Then there were all the families waiting outside La Cuarenta at the time, uselessly holding bundles of cash, jewellery, watches, deeds to properties, prepared to barter their souls to have their loved ones released. Flaco forced himself to continue. “Isn’t it important to you to know Pindalo got you out? It can’t undo what happened, but facts remove some of the mystery and fear from memory. Anything you share could be important, if only to document what they did to you.” Talking and talking as Alma paced the courtyard, kicking at little piles of dried leaves in the corners.

  Until finally, she began to tell him of her arrival in Montréal, not knowing another soul and running into them — Latinos from all over the Americas — and discovering what had brought them to leave their countries. How slowly, often coincidentally, through work or at the Hispanic bookstore, in a lineup to a movie or at a music festival, she’d encountered those tortured in Chile, abducted in Argentina, prosecuted in Uruguay, imprisoned in Paraguay.“The language they used to express their suffering was a lot more subtle than the code we used during the junta, Flaco.”

  Alma mentioned a Chilean teacher she’d met at her college. “Arrested in 1973 during the coup, Tomás was brought to the stadium in Santiago, held there with hundreds of others, until he was sent north. Tomás spent six months in a prison, where he was tortured on a regular basis. Six months! When I met Tomás, it had been eighteen years since his kidnapping but he was still building up defences against memories of the pain.”

  Flaco sensed she’d loved this man, it was in her eyes, but he couldn’t help himself. “Did he tell you how it felt? Seeing Pinochet’s return to Chile on TV after his year of house arrest in Britain? After claiming to be too ill to face prosecution? And watching him rise from that wheelchair, a cockroach creeping along the tarmac, oozing scorn as he waved his cane in the air like a weapon in front of all the cameras? While the generals in Chile, Argentina and Luscano were breathing a massive sigh of relief. How’d your Tomás feel about that?” Flaco still wondered how the world had slept that March night three years ago.

  “Tomás left Montréal. I don’t know how he felt about it.”

  If she’d had an affair with this Tomás, Flaco guessed it had ended badly for her. “Chica, you don’t have to decide now. I just wanted you to know what’s going on before you come to my party.” He had to gamble that in meeting Lalo Martín, she’d sense his commitment and genuine compassion. Just as Flaco had when he’d met the lawyer at a conference last year, the first public discussion of Luscano’s disappeared and the consequences for a generation silenced.

  Alma stood in front of him and delivered the argument he could not refute. All the investigations in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and elsewhere, what had they actually accomplished? A few senior officers convicted over the long years. “Governments don’t really want to mess with the military, do they?”

  True enough. “Even if we don’t get a single conviction, at least we’ve aired the truth and broken the silence.”

  “What are the risks?” Alma asked the question she should have posed in 1990 when she’d submitted her poem for publication. “It’s not the time,” she said, “to distress this house.”

  Flaco was unwilling to admit what had happened to some who’d come forward in the recent past. The journalists Ernesto had alluded to, found dead in their cars after an article condemning a general here, an oligarch there. He conceded that there were those who’d do anything to sabotage the inquiry. “The ones protesting loudest, they’ve good reason to be alarmed. There is no statute of limitations for what they did.”

  “Your students, do they care? ‘Los desaparecidos,’ they’re just a band these days.”

  The words stung. He couldn’t lie and say his students cared, despite his efforts to engage them. Flaco rose. He was already late for his next class. “May I say good-bye to your mother?”

  Alma waited by the front door as Flaco entered the bedroom. Hannelore opened her eyes, her face against the pillow as bloodless as the roses on the nightstand. She gestured at the bouquet. “From an admirer. Can you believe it?”

  “There must be thousands out there!”

  Hannelore reached for his hand. “Gracias, Flaco, for getting her back. Did she tell you how long she’ll be staying? I don’t dare ask.”

  “Her sabbatical ends in January.” He wondered what Hannelore would make of his plea to Alma, could only hope the fighter in her would approve.

  “Adios, Flaco.”

  The common farewell, to God, had never sounded so apt.

  The absence of sound in the house was disconcerting. A storm had knocked out the electricity and silenced the whirr and clank of the refrigerator, the hissing of the water heater, the sputtering moths scorched by light bulbs, leaving only the alarm clock marking the seconds to midnight and her voice. For hours now, Alma had been sitting by the bed in the flickering light of candles, reading to her mother. Every time she tried to stop, Hannelore ordered her to continue.

  Alma began Valéry’s “The Seaside Cemetery.” Ce toit tranquille, ou marchent des colombes, / Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes…. Alma read all twenty-four stanzas until the last one, opening with Le vent se lève!…Il faut tenter de vivre!

  “I hear it, the wind picking up.” Hannelore whispered. “Let the waves…break!”

  Alma closed the book. Her eyes were strained. She preferred the railing and taking stock to this, her mother’s laboured breathing. The curtains were open to silhouettes of trees bending against the sea wind and through the silence, unwanted sounds, vivid as Valéry’s images but violent, dredged up by Flaco’s visit. Still, one truth remained that she could hold to: poetry steadied. Whenever the fragility of existence overwhelmed, there were always words.

  “What…did Flaco want?”

  “He wanted me to…come to his birthday party.”

  “Go. You must.”

  “It’s tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll be fine. Xenia’s here… You know, Alma, I’ve been thinking…Flaco needs a woman to direct his energies. Not you…he’d smother you. You need someone…to cherish but who’ll give you the space you need.”

  Alma had to agree. But her craving for space was so often misunderstood. After Tomás, she’d given up on Latino men and turned to nationals, Canadians and Québécois, more reserved in the way they loved. Eventually, after a few months, Alma became restless with these men who wouldn’t touch her scar, couldn’t process the parts of her past she shared with them. They lacked the imagination to understand how it was to come of age in Luscano. Exile became the roadblock to intimacy.

  Alma watched the duvet rise and fall. She waited thr
ough each exhalation, holding her own breath, fending off panic until she saw the next inhalation. What if the breathing stopped? She’d call Xenia, they’d summon the doctor, an ambulance. It would be awful.

  Just after three in the morning, Xenia came to the bedroom to relieve her. Alma pulled the duvet to her mother’s chin. Hannelore briefly opened her eyes. “Did you find the envelope…in your wardrobe?”

  Alma hadn’t bothered arranging her clothes, preferring her suitcases open on the floor and the readiness to flee.

  “Your father. A piece he wrote for you.”

  Alma carried a candle to her room, cupping her hand over the flame. She opened the wardrobe, felt around the top shelf and found an envelope. Perhaps she should wait until morning before opening it. It was dark, she’d not left the house all day, felt exhausted from the immobility of her bedside vigil. The pressure from Flaco weighed on her. How to make him understand the distance she’d come in warding off memory, the hard work of relegating the past to a vault, one holding dangerous goods? As long as she kept it shut, it couldn’t contaminate her.

  She sat down on her bed and contemplated the manila envelope. Another truth came to mind. Only two people had ever loved her without any expectations, Xenia and her father. She’d always sensed her father’s implicit understanding and wordless love. Alma couldn’t remember having any of the conflicts she’d had with her mother. Even the night she’d left, distraught and panicked, he’d said very little on their drive to the airport. After purchasing the ticket, he’d handed her a packet of cash and said, “You’ll be fine as long as you keep writing.” As he waited with her in the departure lounge, he’d spoken of his music and how it had carried him through the worst of his life.

  Alma tore open the envelope, removed a single page and held it close to the flame of the candle. The bars of sheet music were pencilled with tiny signs, hand-written notations, crescendos and legatos. She tried to hum the melody, a complicated minor key, but she’d never been good at sight-reading. It took several bars before she understood from the phrasing and tempo that the music had been written with her poem in mind. Sometime before he died, her father, sitting at the piano, had transposed her lines and stanzas to create these sounds. By conveying a refusal to retract, to keep silent, her father had assumed some part in her suffering. There was comfort in this but shame as well.

  It was a weekday morning when Hannelore had called her in Montréal to tell her of the sudden heart attack. “An easy death,” she’d said. “Eugen didn’t suffer.” Alma had gone to the college as usual. Only for a moment in the classroom, when a student was reading “Los heraldos negros” by César Vallejo, had she felt an inner hammering. Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes…. Returning home after class, craving solitude, she’d found Tomás at the kitchen table. He was cutting out tiny figures from black and white photographs of his student days in Santiago. The friends, she’d guessed, who’d disappeared. She took the scissors away from him and held his hands to dispel his delusions.

  7

  Palm fronds and debris scattered across the Rambla del Mar slowed the traffic into Barrio Norte. “This mess from the storm, it’s been here for days. Why doesn’t someone clean it up?”

  “There’s a strike,” Damian answered without looking back at his boss through the mirror.

  “There’s always a strike. Who gave them the right to strike anyway?”

  “Not me, Patrón, that’s for sure.”

  Damian pulled the car into the driveway and activated the remote to open the gates. Patrón Pindalo grabbed his briefcase and left the idling car, entered the house and hurried into his study. He went to lower the blinds. Outside the window overlooking the garden, his grandchildren were playing games on a table by the pool. He fumbled for the light switch on the wall, dropped his blazer on the sofa and sat down at his desk.

  He removed the money-counter from a drawer and switched it on, admiring the sleek design of the gringo gadget he’d purchased in Vegas. Before divorce was legalized in Luscano, he’d gone there to extricate himself from his second wife, an American who’d tired of Luscano in less than a year. He’d bought her off with enough cash to open a gallery in Santa Fe in exchange for the certificate of divorce issued by the State of Nevada. And this prize, purchased the day he’d checked out of the casino hotel, had sweetened the deal. The money-counter impressed him more than the slots and tables where unhealthy gringos sat losing their nest eggs in, of all places, the richest country in the world. On that first visit to Vegas, he’d never considered opening a casino in Luscano. That brainstorm had come later.

  He opened his briefcase and stacked the ten envelopes on his desk. Half a million dollars laundered through his bank, one of the smoothest deals ever. As soon as the rifles had been unloaded from the ship, they were on their way south in a truck destined for Buenos Aires, all the evidence — the cargo ship, the arms and ammunition, the monies — dispersed and untraceable. The broker had handled the entire shipment. Patrón Pindalo had assumed that from Argentina, the rifles would be exported elsewhere, to Venezuela or Colombia, but no, he was told supply could hardly keep up with demand in that country. Those crazy porteños! Home invasions and express kidnappings had them arming themselves like civil warriors. With Argentina’s crisis, the complete default on its bonds and debt, millions of workers had been plunged into poverty. Many resorted to theft and their rich targets became vigilantes, protecting their valuables and their homes. “Son locos,” the broker explained. “They fire twice, first to kill the assailant and then at the ceiling so they can claim they fired a warning shot.”

  Patrón Pindalo ran each of the ten bundles of cash through the counter. The bills purred smoothly, the LED confirming 50,000 in flashing red digits. Every single envelope intact. The old warrior, el guerrero his employees called him, was not obliged to count his loot. This had been done several times by loyal associates, but trust never trumped temptation. A few bills siphoned off here and there. Greed was the grease that fuelled the economy. He could smell it everywhere, even in the reek of cowhide from his briefcase. They called him names but nobody dared steal from Patrón Pindalo.

  He heard a tap-tapping at the door. “¿Abuelo?”

  “I’m working!”

  Magdalena rattled the knob. “Why’s the door locked?”

  Patrón Pindalo shoved the envelopes into a drawer and closed his briefcase. After he unlocked the door, Magdalena ran into the study, inspecting the shelves of polo trophies, the bar with bottles, the coffee table. She made for his desk. “What’s this?”

  Patrón Pindalo dropped into the sofa. “It counts money.” No point in lying, the girl was too damn smart. “Saves the old thumbs.”

  “Can I try it?”

  “Do you have some American dollars on you?” He pulled out his wallet, made a show of looking through its compartments. “Neither do I. Now fix me a drink, my little nosy one.”

  She skipped to the bar, always eager to try new things, just like Esmiralda. And the girl resembled his first wife, too. Long legs even for an eleven-year-old, wavy blonde hair, blue eyes. Everyone said she looked like Ernesto but he preferred to see the resemblance to Esmiralda who, like their son, had been taller than Patrón Pindalo but sweet enough not to lord it over him. He instructed his granddaughter step by step — the glass and Johnny Walker, the coaster and then the ice in the small fridge next to the safe by the desk. When she was installed beside him on the sofa, slurping from a Coke can held in her fingers, nails smudged with pink polish, he asked what she’d wanted in the first place.

  “I’ve been trying to call Papa. He has to sign my report card.”

  “Get your mother to sign it.”

  “Mama flew to Miami yesterday. For shopping.”

  Patrón Pindalo chewed the ice laced with whisky. He could mastermind the perfect deal, but his family? The adults, selfish and unreliable. First Ernesto had gone AWOL and now his daughter-i
n-law. Had he known she was in Miami, he’d have asked her to visit Celeste, a case almost as sad as Ernesto. His daughter called only when she ran out of funds. Like his second wife, she’d opened an art gallery somewhere on South Beach that never seemed to make any money, sucking the hard-earned cash out of his pockets.

  Magdalena squinted at him. “You sign it. Instead of Patrón, write Ernesto and then Pindalo.”

  “That, my little schemer, is fraud. You know what happens to people at the bank when they fake someone’s signature? We call the police and they go to jail. You want me in prison?”

  She shook her head, alarmed at the prospect of another adult failing her. Patrón Pindalo put his hand on her head. “I’ll sign it proudly with my name and a note explaining your parents are unavailable.”

  The bell sounded for lunch and he was obliged to leave the study, Magdalena in tow, having just this morning delivered a sermon to his grandchildren on the virtues of punctuality.

  After the midday meal, the house settled into siesta quiet and he returned to the study to lock the envelopes of cash in his safe. He knelt on the carpet and turned the dial clockwise then counter-clockwise and clockwise again, the birth date of Esmiralda, may she rest in peace. He felt his back twinge as he strained to reach down, placing the envelopes on a stack of deeds and certificates. Patrón Pindalo felt around for the gold, the watch and jewellery cases, then sat back on his haunches, questioning his sanity.

  Eventually he locked the safe and rose stiffly, poured himself another Scotch and lay down on the sofa. He detested inertia but there were moments in his life when he resorted to reflection. The box was gone and he was damn sure he hadn’t removed it. But why would someone steal from the safe and leave the cash and gold? It didn’t make sense.

  He forced himself to think back. It was not difficult to recall the spring burial and twelve-gun salute, the masquerade to cover up the suicide. November 1998, the night before his death, General Galtí had called, asking for an immediate meeting. Appearing some minutes later, he’d handed over a box. “Patrón, I need you to take care of these files. You have a safe place, I’m sure, at the bank or wherever it suits you.” A modest favour, it seemed at the time, and Patrón Pindalo had owed him. It was the nature of their relationship, favours traded over drinks and cigars. Here in this study, Galtí had said something like, “You know we had to clean things up, Patrón, remove the troublemakers. The box contains some papers from that time. I wouldn’t want them to fall in the wrong hands. Feel free to take a look if you wish. They might come in handy.” The General appeared sallow and bloated. A known drinker, he’d not taken well to human rights lawyers and gringos investigating the junta and the rumours implicating his leadership.